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said.
The latest incident between students and the rectorate at USU followed the rector’s firing last week of 18 administrators who were in charge of the Suara USU online portal.
The rector, Runtung Sitepu, also threatened to revoke the publishing permit of the Suara USU website on which the LGBT-themed short story was published.
Runtung said USU strongly opposed pro-LGBT movements on campus. USU head of public relations Elvi Sumanti said the decision was appropriate since the published short story was not in line with the university’s code of ethics and morals.
“The Suara USU student press was disbanded because they did not concede to the fact that they published a morally questionable short story. They didn’t even intend to compromise by pulling the story off the website,” she said.
The author of the short story said she wrote it to fight against discrimination targeted at minority groups. The lesbian characters in the story were only examples of such groups, she said.
The country has seen an increasing trend of intolerance of anything related to the LGBT community in recent years. The latest incident of intolerance involved Instagram account @alpantuni, which regularly posted a comic strip about a gay Muslim. The account stirred controversy among Indonesian netizens in February, prompting the Communications and Information Ministry to demand that Instagram shut down the account on the pretext that it contained pornography.
Activists have said that anti-LGBT sentiment is on the rise ahead of the general election and claim that many politicians are exploiting homophobia to secure votes.